The purpose of the Silver project is to develop a small number of easy-to-make components that can be combined into a complete AR-15 lower receiver.

Because the design of the AR-15 lower receiver is essentially in the public domain, many folks have, over the years, endeavored to produce their own examples at home, in their own workshops, for their own use (any other use, such as unlicensed sales, would violate Federal law). Materials employed include billet aluminum, plastic, wood, even HDPE cutting board. The increasing availability of low-cost desktop CNC mills and 3D printers has accelerated this drive. Finally, of course, the so-called “80% receiver” movement has allowed many thousands of hobbyists (and, quite likely, more than a few felons) to produce their own aluminum AR-15 receivers with little more than a power drill or a router.

The 80% process leaves me kind of cold (essentially, you drill or route some material from a nearly complete AR-15 lower forging), but I’m still interested in making AR-15 receivers and even complete rifles of my own design. I don’t have a CNC mill, nor am I skilled machinist. But I have a great deal of experience designing parts made from custom aluminum extrusions. So I thought about how I could employ custom aluminum extrusions to produce an AR-15 receiver design that required a bare minimum of machining. The design I arrived at is called Silver (the project names I use are assigned randomly by a spreadsheet I have set up).

Silver comprises four separate components, plus fasteners. Each component is machined from a custom aluminum extrusion:

Fire control group (FCG) receptacle

Grip and stock support

Left magazine well

Right magazine well

Because the two magazine well parts use the same extrusion, there are three extrusion profiles.

The object is to make the machining as easy as possible, so even CNC n00bs can do it on cheap mini-mills or maybe even drill presses. The version I have produced today, Silver III, can doubtless be optimized in that direction; but because I am a long way from producing physical aluminum specimens, I thought it wouldn’t hurt to expose where I am now for comment and suggestions.

Once the designs are finalized (and assuming there is anything more than the most tenuous interest in what I am doing), I intend to produce the extruded parts for sale and publish the drawings and specifications along an open source model.

There are legal issues. After consultation with my (firearms) attorney, I’ll write to the ATF Firearms and Ammunition Technology Division to get them to declare exactly when does something like this become a firearm. I’m not interested in knowing how many holes need to be drilled before we have crossed an arbitrary threshold; I would prefer to understand whether they think any one of the four completed parts is a firearm (I suspect they will declare a fully machined FCG receptacle a regulated firearm), or some combination of parts. Obviously all four parts screwed together is a complete (if stripped) AR-15 receiver, but when is that line crossed?

This is of interest to me because I may also want to produce machined parts for sale, though I don’t really want to have to get an 07 FFL. Maybe if ATF says the FCG receptacle is a firearm, I could offer the other three parts fully machined plus an unmachined FCG receptacle. Who knows? Just thinking out loud here.

Obviously this is much more complicated than banging out a receiver from an 80% forging, so I am not thinking about the guy who just needs a quick unpapered receiver (or twenty of them) for whatever reason (I don’t wanna know). I am more interested in the firearms hobbyist like me, the guy who likes to noodle around in the shop, who doesn’t mind machining and customizing stuff, but would also appreciate a shortcut.

A lot of guys who have gotten this far and have looked at the illustration have already said to themselves, “Hmm, if those magazine well pieces were bigger, they could accept 7.62x51mm magazines.” Yep. The Silver design could be made very flexible that way. It could be made to accept any of the several 7.62x51mm and .308 Win magazine standards that are out there. Maybe even AK or 9mm mags. A different grip and stock support could be used to make an AR-10. It goes on and on. And it doesn’t have to be hard, or expensive: a custom extrusion die costs $750.

These are early days. By June of 2016 I will be living in Reno, NV, and aside from some preliminary 3D printed SLAs, I won’t be doing any production before then. Living in Nevada makes a lot of this much easier compared to living in California. But in the open source spirit that is driving this development, I thought I would take some time to introduce this now, to get some input and ideas. Shortly I will be making Parasolid files available on my website for free download. I think it’s a neat idea, but you guys might think it stinks.

This week I have been struggling to complete a product line extension, trying to get it into production and off my desk so I can move on to the many other projects that we have prioritized.

This week’s project is a typical one. It is for a line of shell carriers (and two optics rails) that are derived from a single custom aluminum extrusion profile. As usual, there are three configurations (four-, six- and eight-shell aluminum versions) of two different rail lengths, plus a polymer shell carrier for each; doubled, as they are for two different shotgun platforms that will use the same extruded aluminum bracket; plus the two optics rails.

So the total number of new SKUs is 18. To define these 18 new SKUs there are a total of 82 new part numbers and processes; 36 multi-part assemblies (including SKUs); 17 machining assemblies; and 14 plating assemblies. The bills of materials for all these assemblies have to be defined (I use Excel). Then there are a total of 18 engineering drawings to be completed, in PDF and DXF formats. Here are all the parts laid out:

Basically you see two examples of each part (one for the Mossberg 500 and one for the Mossberg 930, which share similar – though not identical – receiver dimensions), plus the three cut extrusion lengths.

It’s hard for me to focus on this during this week’s equatorial heat, and even tougher when the phone rings.

This project is necessary but boring. I have done similar things many times. Some of the things I move onto next are a lot more exciting, but I gotta get through this one first.

I very rarely go to movies anymore. I think the last time I went was at least three years ago. I really don’t like the crowds, the commercials, the noise.

But Everest is the first movie that has come along in a long time that I was interested in seeing in the cinema. I’m not sure why, I think because I already knew the story and was interested in seeing how they put it together. And it was Monday night, so the cinema would be deserted.

Well, I thought it was just great; I couldn’t find anything wrong with it.* I have read Krakauer’s and Weathers’ books and as far as I can tell the movie followed events very closely. No Hollywood bullshit that I could see (the only part that looked like Hollywood bullshit was Rob Hall’s dying phone conversation with his pregnant wife, but of course that really happened). The special effects were amazing, a completely seamless combination of sound stage, location and CGI. Finally, and best of all, there was no big “message” to the film: it was simply a dramatic retelling of events. What a relief.

I haven’t read Anatoli Boukreev’s book, which I understand was an answer or a response to Krakauer’s. Having based most of my understanding of the 1996 disaster on Krakauer’s account, I was surprised to see the Krakauer character being a lot less heroic than I remember from his book! I guess that’s because the movie is based on multiple sources, including Boukreev.

They necessarily had to focus on one central character, and for that they chose Rob Hall, who’s story was more interesting anyway. So Scott Fischer is really a fairly minor character in the movie. Boukreev is too. Beck Weathers was a bigger character (I told Ingrid when I read his book that he sounded like a bit of an asshole, and indeed that’s how he was played)

Ingrid was curled up in her seat most of the time, shaking her fists and muttering, “Go! Go! Go! Get down!” at the screen. Afterwards she said she felt “beat up.” It was certainly an intense experience.

I don’t know whether this movie will ignite more interest in climbing Everest or put more people off the idea.

* Well, Ingrid did ask, “How come they keep taking off their masks and goggles?” I suggested it was so we could recognize the actors.

The Great Greenwich Village Pubcawl of 1987 began in the Broadway Lounge of the Marriott Marquis Hotel in New York City. The new Marriott Marquis is where the old Astor hotel used to be, and the circular Broadway Lounge overlooks Times Square eight floors above the street.

The Broadway Lounge is a revolving bar which turns in a counter-clockwise direction at varying speeds. The last time I was there the floor revolved pretty quickly, but during my first visits it moved like the minute hand on a clock; stationary to the naked eye but turning inexorably nonetheless. I first encountered the Broadway Lounge in July of 1986, during what MTV called “Liberty or Death Weekend,” when I spent an afternoon and most of the evening up there with some people from HA Bruno. We were all getting soundly pissed on the various mixed drinks which were brought to our table in a seemingly endless supply, due primarily to Bruno’s excellent credit with the Marriott.

When we found our seats at the Broadway Lounge, they were under the windows near the southern wall. Three vodka-tonics later we were 180º opposite where we had first sat down. When I noticed this I became extremely nervous, then leapt to my feet shouting, “What the hell’s going on here? Stop this goddamned thing at once!” I attempted to cuff a passing cocktail waitress and climb over several other seated patrons to get out of the bar, but Damon and Richard got up and wrestled me back down into my seat. They seized a shot glass of ice-cold syrupy Stolichnaya from a neighboring table and shoved it up under my nose. I knocked the filthy thing back and ceased from that moment to worry about the revolving Broadway Lounge, though I did get a little agitated later when scenes from David Wolper’s grotesque and tasteless Statue of Liberty Celebration, which was taking place at that moment less than five miles away, appeared on the overhead television screens.

The next summer, the Broadway Lounge held no horrors for me. By the time matinee crowds spilled out onto 7th Avenue that fateful Sunday in September I had spent countless inebriated hours on that great spinning plate, drinking untold numbers of vodka-tonics and consuming frightening quantities of the Marriott’s unique and nourishing cheese crackers (which were, mercifully, free of charge for drinking customers). I was a well-recognized veteran of the Broadway Lounge, and because the various persons from whom I typically cadged drinks always paid amply and promptly, I was a popular fixture as well, at least as far as the management was concerned.

That day Jimbo and I had become fed up with the tedium of booth setup for our respective companies and left the Javitts Center for the cool hospitality of the Broadway Lounge at around 3:00. We felt mean and ugly, and decided to walk back to Times Square from 12th Avenue through the noise and stench of the stale asphalt jungle of Hells Kitchen. By the time we found our seats in the revolving bar 20 minutes later we were tired and thirsty, and demanded immediate attention from the waitress in very loud voices.

We had been in New York for three days, and were wrangling with a creeping exhaustion which threatened to result in complete systemic breakdowns in both of us before the show even started in two days. It was imperative, we decided as we collapsed into the deep maroon chairs and ordered three drinks apiece to begin, that we break the wave of trade show fatigue which threatened to claim us before the real partying began in earnest Tuesday night. An Event was definitely in order, immediately, tonight, one highlighted by revolting excesses and terrifying depredations rendered upon the citizens of this debased and forsaken city. We could see no other alternative.

We also had to find someone to pay for these drinks. The Broadway Lounge is very cavalier about running up drink tabs on people. Long experience has taught them that if they serve enough drinks to a table, eventually someone is going to become so bent that he’ll pay anything they ask. Within a half hour Jimbo and I had run up a $75 bill by sucking down five drinks each, and we were only getting started. It was critical that a fish was found before the tab got much higher.

About 4:00 our prayers were answered when Lono Pituitary showed up and sat with us. He was my techie then, and to this day can always be counted on to do the British thing and pay for lunch, dinner, the bar tab, taxi fare, your car rental, an abortion, whatever. He chain-smokes like an Arab, and conversations with him are punctuated ceaselessly with terrible phlegmy back-cracking coughs which echo like pistol shots, especially when you make him laugh, “Ha, ha, ha, ha, — HACK, CHACK, HACK, CHACK, WHEEZE, HACK, HACK!!” The three of us started discussing women, I think, getting more and more boisterous as the conversation developed. Lono P pulled out his American Express card and called for another round of drinks.

Ten minutes after Lono P sat down Stagg Meander appeared in the midst of much cheerful yelling and slapping of backs. He was living in Sumatra at the time, and remains a huge bearded guy who gets along with most people who aren’t dickheads and has friends in every city in the world I’ve ever visited with him, except Boston, where he usually struts around provocatively in bright yellow and purple Lakers t-shirts. He drinks like a tuna, gambles like some dissipated example of faded European nobility, and casually ingests many mind-altering substances of the sort proscribed by virtually all US law enforcement agencies. He is a good man to have standing by in hazardous situations, when a special weirdness is required to confuse the enemy and make good your escape. Stagg sat down and we shouted at the waitress for another round of drinks. Jimbo drank Jack Daniels over ice, Lono P sipped at gin or some such foul swill, Stagg was an inveterate addict of White Russians, while I stuck to the venerable and time-honored vodka-tonic.

Stagg announced that there was a jazz festival of sorts that night in a number of select bars in Greenwich Village, and that we had to make immediate preparations to go there with him and two old friends of his he ran into that afternoon at the Moroccan Embassy. I wanted to know why the hell he wasn’t at the Javitts Center with me in the afternoon, “You bastard,” I screamed, “What were you doing at the Moroccan Embassy?” But Jimbo and Lono P shouted me down, demanding more information about the jazz festival, a potential Event for the evening.

It was some kind of informal thing spread all over the Village. We had only to get our asses down there, then schmooze around from bar to bar, catching the latest riffs of a 70-year-old musical style that was fading fast into the loathsome triple-Z funk now found on most Los Angeles FM radio stations. As an Event, the Village jazz festival offered enormous potential for severe psychological and physiological self-abuse on so many levels it made my head reel. It was exactly what we needed to pull ourselves out of our brooding pre-show despondency, and I could feel my adrenal gland quickly escalating chemical production in anticipation of the evening’s promised outrages, winding me into a hormone-crazed knot. I wanted to know when we were leaving and Stagg yelled, “Soon! Soon! When my friends get here,” then ordered another White Russian. We all fell then to angry complaining about the state of modern popular music, and also why it was that Republican administrations seemed lately (since 1968) to find it necessary to staff themselves with thugs, gangsters, blackmailers and other criminals, becoming executive-level goon squads of violent hustlers and extortionists.

Before too long the discourse degraded into a shouting match between Jimbo and Stagg about the weirdest and most dangerous places either of them had ever “done it.” By this time I was so far gone I had only a groping shadow of an idea of what they were saying, but it was still a very good show, with Stagg constantly leaping up and thrusting his chin into Jimbo’s face, shouting vulgar points of view at the top of his lungs. Jimbo would hop to his feet and scream back at him, then both of them would pound on the tiny plastic table and scatter tasty Marriott cheese crackers all over the place. Somehow, Lono P and I found the proceedings immensely entertaining and hilarious, because both of us were whooping and screaming (“Ha, ha, HACK, CHACK, WHEEZE, HACK, HACK!!”) and slapping our drinks around, offering absurd suggestions and arcane historical references as loudly as possible.

One by one the tables adjacent to ours emptied of patrons, so Lono P and I seized the vacant chairs for use as footstools and finished off the dregs of the abandoned drinks and delicious Marriott cheese crackers. Soon my wife showed up at the Broadway Lounge, and Stagg immediately went upstairs to his room to eat some powerful drugs. My wife sat down and ordered some iced tea or a coke or something, acted as if she was offended by our antics and conversation, and was roundly ignored by all of us for the rest of the evening.

By this time Jimbo and I were teary-eyed, screaming at each other about an especially funny all-night overtime session at IPG, an Orange County photo lab where we both once worked with Stagg. The core of this side-splitting tale was a nonsense song we made up that night when we were 17 mind-numbing hours into our shifts, delirious with fatigue, about nose-hairs. Naturally a stirring rendition of this rousing ballad was in order, for the benefit of the remaining patrons of the Broadway Lounge, so we stood up and lit into it at excessively high volume, smashing our drinks together and strewing alcohol and ice everywhere, while Lono P coughed his rattly laugh and watched the inert walls of the bar slide silently by.

Presently, after three or four goes at the Nose-Hair Song, I spotted Stagg making his glittery-eyed way through the eighth floor lobby towards us, so I grabbed Lono P’s shoulder, hissing, “The tab, get the tab!” I pulled Jimbo with me as I stepped over a chair, upsetting the table and the residue of our revelries, and Stagg staggered through the scattered bar patrons to the entrance to the Broadway Lounge. I had to step over a few seated people, but this was okay since I stand about 6’5″ tall, even drunk. Jimbo tried to follow my steps over the chairs, but he fell over them instead, and it was taking us a lot longer to get to Stagg than I thought it should have. Suddenly it seemed that the revolving bar was picking up speed, and I had to get off it at once, before it was too late. I panicked, left Jimbo to his own fate, and began falling over people myself, tall as I am, screaming, “Sorry! Sorry!! Look out,” making my way as quickly as possible to the narrowing entrance before I was cut off, or worse, cut in half by the glass wall of the revolving bar as it caught me in the gap after a horrible alcohol-induced miscalculation. It was like a bad dream, shoving my way through outraged drinkers in a do-or-die race with the revolving glass wall (which, I learned the next day, was actually connected to the stationary part of the wall and didn’t move at all), until I finally reeled across the gap to Stagg, clutched onto him and began shouting, “Lono P’s still in there! We gotta get Lono P out!”

“It’s okay,” said Stagg, “He’s with your wife.”

“Never mind my wife, I wept, “Who’s gonna pay for the drinks?”

“To hell with that,” said Jimbo as he wobbled off the treacherous spinning bar, “Where’s this jazz festival?”

“We’re ready to go,” replied Stagg, brushing me off his body, “But first I have to introduce my two buddies.” He waved his arm towards two more huge guys standing a couple yards off, evaluating the scene for themselves, and introduced them as Dan Something and Rodney Okay, a couple of dangerous drug-eaters Stagg knew from his college days. I looked down at their feet and noticed they were both hovering several inches off the floor, then nudged Jimbo silently and pointed at the phenomenon. Stagg said it was okay, Dan and Rodney had just come back from an intense three-hour mushroom-gobbling session at Columbia University, so there really wasn’t anything to worry about. In fact, Stagg was more concerned about Jimbo and myself, and said we both looked ready to erupt into senseless and spontaneous violence at any moment. “I think it would be far too hazardous to allow you guys to ride with Dan and Rodney in a taxi,” he said, “We’ll have to take the subway.”

We slipped through the Times Square throngs like a band of tall pin-striped guerrillas, occasionally knocking over flimsy Three Card Monty tables and treading upon the counterfeit watches spread on the sidewalk. We were bewildered by the subway station itself, and would probably be staggering around down there still if we hadn’t been assisted to our platform by a little gnome of a man from Queens. We sniggered over the tokens and took turns holding onto Lono P, who was leaning out over the tracks to feel the wind on his face. When our train came we piled into it like drunken sailors, which we were halfway on our ways to becoming.

There was a frightened-looking middle-aged Puerto Rican man sitting across from me. Jimbo got up and grabbed his dingy plaid shirt, shouting, “How about that Bernie Goetz? Now there’s a guy who means business! Carries a gun onto the subway, great!” Jimbo’s face was inches away from the man’s own, and he swayed as the train bumped over the tracks, gripping the poor bastard’s shirt to remain standing. He continued, “Are you packing? I am!” He motioned to the rest of us, “We all are! I’ve gotta Colt Python .45 automatic in my coat pocket.” He began to shout out into the car at large, “My buddy Stagg over there’s carrying three CS tear gas grenades.” He suddenly seized the Puerto Rican, who looked pale and very near death, with his other hand. “You can never be too careful,” he leered, “These subways are teeming with pimps and dagos.”

Then Rodney Okay jumped up and said, “Here’s our stop,” and grabbed Jimbo away from the man, while my wife grumbled, “Thank God,” or something to that effect. Stagg was busy whisking what he thought were big green spiders from his shirt, muttering, “Where’d these goddamned spiders come from?” while Dan Something sat with his eyes screwed shut and his teeth bared and I bitched about the rancid subway smell to Lono P, who giggled distractedly.

We got off the subway in Soho somewhere, where the clean straight streets and avenues of Central Manhattan mutate into the mangled chaos of Greenwich Village, the Bowery, and Wall Street. On the sidewalk outside the subway station Jimbo spotted a small cigar stand, so we all rushed in and ogled over the display of luscious Caribbean cheroots. Everyone except Lono P and my wife bought swollen overpriced stogies. The unctuous Cuban who ran the shop assured me that the five-dollar selection I picked out was “hand-rolled on the warm brown thighs of Dominican virgins.” We lit up and proceeded into the Village followed by an eye-watering cloud of acrid cigar smoke.

The first Jazz Festival bar we came to had a ten dollar cover charge, so we moved on down the street. Before long it became evident that all the Jazz Festival bars were all demanding outrageous cover charges, and the only way we were going to hear any jazz was if we all broke down and forked over at least ten bucks apiece, which we couldn’t charge to our employers because we wouldn’t get receipts. Then there was the hideous prices such places would charge for drinks to consider. Our beleaguered minds boggled.

Finally we came to a place that wanted fifteen dollars per person just to get in. Because my wife was along, it would have cost me thirty smacks. “You crazy greedheads!” I shouted at the gigantic Italian bouncer who was manning the door, “Are you out of your goddamned minds? Thirty bucks! You filthy swine, you shit-eating vermin!” I was really pissed off, “Where’s your goddamned manager, you ugly wop?” Stagg pulled me away from the bouncer while Jimbo started shouting, “Who the hell you calling a wop, you bastard, I’m a goddamned wop!” and Lono P and my wife proceeded down the street pretending they weren’t with us. A half-block away I was still shouting, “Thirty bucks! The fascist reptiles! Who do they think they are? To hell with these jazz bastards, let’s go get something to drink.”

We found a nearby bar populated with students or some similar such swine in dress shirts and jeans, and their vapid-looking women with names like Babs and Bootsy. These sorry young scions didn’t like the looks of us at all, but we ignored them and found a small table in a corner near the window. Lono P went up to the bar, hawked loudly, let out a resonant belch, and ordered two rounds of drinks for us while Rodney Okay marauded around the tavern in search of empty chairs. Stagg was beginning to feel extremely violent, and was thinking of maybe going back to the last place and stomping that huge bouncer. Naturally, I encouraged him, but Jimbo got nervous and said something about there being a Raiders game on that night. Stagg suddenly swung around to Jimbo and yelled, “What? The Raiders? Good gibbering God, that’s right, it’s Sunday night!” He stood up and shouted at the bartender, “Hey, where’s the goddamned TV around here?” to which the bartender, a man of refinement, answered, “Go lick a dog’s ass till it bleeds, dickhead.” Stagg was about to leap over the table to go for the bartender when Lono P appeared suddenly at the table with an armful of alcohol. Stagg seized a White Russian and knocked it back at once, then called out, “Yo, Pituitary, see if these uncultured Yankee bastards have any Anchor Steam!”

Of course, the uncultured Yankee bastards had never heard of Anchor Steam, so after we consumed our second round of drinks Stagg hissed, “Let’s blow this dive.” We all immediately got up from our chairs, but Dan Something moved too fast and fell backwards in his, grabbing for support some insipid coed who was sitting behind him. She went down with him, but not before she kicked over the table at which she and three dopey girlfriends were engaged in spirited argument about whether Cher or Meryl Steep was the greatest actress who ever lived. The three girls shrieked as their beers splashed over them, while the first girl gurgled in surprise and Lono P said, “Hey!” Most of the nearby students jumped up out of their seats. In a moment the refined bartender was making his way around the end of the bar and Stagg reached down to help up Dan Something, who was slipping in the beer and grabbing onto the coed’s left breast in a sloppy attempt at getting any purchase at all. She began to squawk and Lono P kept saying “Hey!” Jimbo took sudden command of the situation and hurled my wife and Rodney Okay towards the door, then bent down and grabbed Dan Something, who had mistaken Stagg for Alabama Governor George Wallace and was fighting him off, shouting “You racist bastard, get your bloody hands off me!” I helped Jimbo get Dan Something to his feet when Stagg suddenly noticed the bartender coming toward us. He shoved a nearby student over a table as a diversion and pushed the rest of us out the door. On the sidewalk, Lono P was sniggering and giggling like a lunatic, and we pulled him with us as we ran down the street and around a corner.

[Editor’s Note: At this juncture, Mitch’s narrative becomes confused and disjointed, reflecting, perhaps, his extremely advanced state of inebriation by this point in the proceedings. As far as can be determined for certain, the Gang got tossed out of two more bars after Jimbo and Stagg began ordering really dangerous things like tequila and rum, before settling into a place called The Peculiar Pub. There they all watched the Raiders game while drinking a stupendously vile Zimbabwean beer, and Jimbo would bet everyone at the bar on the outcome of each Raiders drive. There also seems to have been an incident near Washington Arch involving a cantaloupe, since at one point Stagg clearly screams, “No you sick bastards, not with the goddamned cantaloupe!” though it is not at all clear what activity Stagg was protesting. The coherent portion of the narrative resumes with Mitch’s reflections on the night of horror, from the vantage of the following morning in his hotel.]

I awoke from the Great Greenwich Village Pub Crawl of 1987 snug in my bed at the Marriott Marquis, 32 floors above Times Square. Amazingly, I was not hung over, owing principally to my abstinence the night before from any chemicals or substances stronger than vodka and tonic water, neither of which cause hangovers in me. I rose, belched, showered, dressed, and went downstairs to meet Lono P in the Howard Johnson’s across 45th Street for breakfast, only slightly more bleary-eyed than usual.

I got off very lightly. The last I remembered seeing of Jimbo was outside the Peculiar Pub, when he jumped onto the passenger side of our cab as my wife and I sped away. A post-mortem of the Event proved that was also just about the last thing Jimbo himself remembered of the evening. He recalls only obscene murky fragments of scenes of further depredation, then waking up the next morning staring up at the drain-pipe of an unfamiliar bathroom sink in the Sheraton on 7th Avenue. His mouth tasted like Drano, his body felt as if he had been viciously stomped by a gang of speed-crazed Malaysian kick-boxers, and the white of one eye was a deep and solid crimson. “It was that beer,” he still raves, “It was virulent poison.” He crept painfully out of the strange hotel room and endured a brutal and debilitating hangover for the next 48 hours.

We never heard from Stagg after that, until early in 1988 when I received a postcard from Penang informing us that he had relocated from Sumatra to Kuala Lumpur.

It is a weird feeling to sit in a Las Vegas hotel at four in the morning — hunkered down with a notebook and tape recorder in a $75-a-day suite and a fantastic room service bill, run up in forty-eight hours of total madness — knowing that just as soon as dawn comes up you are going to flee without paying a fucking penny . . . go stomping out through the lobby and call your red convertible down from the garage and stand there waiting for it with a suitcase full of marijuana and illegal weapons . . . trying to look casual, scanning the first morning edition of the Las Vegas Sun.

– Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

Indeed. Doctor of Journalism Hunter Thompson understood it all and understood it well over twenty years ago when he wrote those lines. The Weird Feeling. The insensate fear and lunacy to which even the best and the brightest succumb after forty-eight or more hours in Old Cibola, after as much as a week given to shameless and degrading activities in the modern Babylon, a City of Light in the forsaken Wilderness, the malingering Las Vegas, at America’s own annual carnival of technology, the outrageous November bacchanal known as Comdex.

For Comdex 1990 I had hoped to organize a debauched and disgusting pre-show “Nobody Escape the Damnation” party, a wild, substance-induced casino crawl up and down the Strip in commemorative t-shirts and a rented convertible, armed to the teeth with automatic weapons. There was just no other way to do Comdex. Saturday the week before the show I faxed Stagg Meander in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

Stagg Meander, Net.D, beer-swilling, cheroot-smoking International Network Guerilla and co-conspirator in previous years’ Comdex degradation, is a pretty colorful fellow, with a fairly colorful résumé which I simply can’t take the time to get into here. Suffice to say that years ago he took over my old job as Computer Graphics Art Director at the Orange County color lab where worked in the early Eighties, and later ended up in Southeast Asia installing networks for small dudes in short-sleeved dress shirts and drab ties who were really nervous about having an uncontrollable maniac like him in their office, but who knew they couldn’t afford not to hire him because he’s really one of the best of his kind in that part of the world.

Stagg’s lucrative international computer consulting business is based for tax reasons on the island of Guernsey in the English Channel, and I manage to connect with him several times a year, at the major US and European computer trade shows.

When I contacted him in October he was installing a Banyan VINES system for Malaysian prime minister Dr. Mahathir Mohamad’s UMNO party. He responded to my fax at 2:00 the next morning with a phone call: “Wake up you lazy pig,” he screamed in his contorted mutant voice which sounded like a cross between Orson Welles and William F. Buckley on heroin, “Your fax came just in time! It’s hot as hell down here and I’m getting a lot of shit from the local Micropolis distributor. The bastard supports the Islam party and won’t sell me any drives. I’m gonna have to smuggle some in from Thailand again. Shit, I’m always doing that!”

“You sound busy,” I said groggily, “Are you sure you have the time?”

“We’re talking about Comdex, right? Besides, Mahathir’s just won another goddamn election and everyone’s gone completely apeshit bananas. Plus, I’ve been getting the usual threatening faxes from the defeated opposition, so it’s a good time to vamoose. Those UMNO yo-yos will be so busy celebrating their victory and settling scores with opposition supporters, it’ll be months before they realize the Banyan system is still down. Hey,” he continued, “I gotta tell you about this VINES setup –”

“We don’t have time for that,” I said, sitting up in the darkness, “How soon can you be here?”

“Well, I gotta stop for a couple days in Kabul, to submit a bid for an eighty-node SFT system, with laser printers. It’s a real bitch because Afghanistan’s still on the COCOM list, they can’t get any equipment at all.” I heard him typing on a computer keyboard, then the sound of a modem dialing out. “I’ve gotta set up a delivery route via Holland, Finland and the Soviet Union, figure 30% loss due to pilferage along the way. I might need some extra time in case the mujaheddin are shelling the airport again. Let’s see, in, out, then to Berlin for a couple days.”

“Berlin? Do you really think you have time for that?”

“Why not? All roads lead to Frankfurt in this modern age, and Berlin’s a quick hop from there. I gotta clear some little things up with Joachim Gauck’s Stasi-dissolution committee. There’s a couple files I need to get my hands on before the new German government does. Just to avoid a little embarrassment I don’t need right now, you understand.”

“Of course. Lots of Germans are doing the same thing.”

“Right. So that’s maybe four, five more days, including travel time. Yeah, I can be at LAX in a week. I’ll send a fax from Potsdam when I know the details.”

“Great, that’ll be just in time. I figure we’ll go in Friday night. I’m unemployed this year so my time is my own.”

“By the way, I wanna set up a hospitality suite at the Flamingo Hilton to entertain some prospects from Bophuthatswana and a guy from Uzbekistan. Do we have a vehicle?”

“Shit,” he yelped, “After last year’s fiasco you wanna go back in there in the same fucking car! Are you outta your goddamned mind?” The previous year’s “fiasco” was a 25-minute firefight with a 300E-load of drunken Daewoo hardware engineers right on the Strip. “This time they’ll probably use anti-tank weapons on us!” Indeed. No less a source than Jim Seymour himself swears the Governor was just five minutes from ordering a full napalm assault just to clear us out, get traffic moving again. The fat man should know, he’s been jacked into the Vegas scene for years, ever since he got them for nearly $2.5 million at the first Comdex/Fall, playing Baccarat and calculating the odds on a CP/M-based Osborne disguised as a respirator.

“Relax,” I said, “I just had the Marauding White Honda fitted with a false bottom, and the Bandini brothers threw in solid tires and bulletproof glass for half-price. Besides, we’re going in light this time. No heavy arms.”

“Can you even get anything in California anymore?” he asked. “I’ve been reading the English-language papers in Singapore. If there’s anything you need, let me know and I can make a quick trip to Bangkok, get some of that shit coming in from the Cambodian refugee camps on the Thai border, real broken-in Khmer Rouge stuff –”

“Hey,” I said, “We don’t need any of that, I want to take it easy this year. But I’ll call Jimbo and see what he can do, just to make you happy. And fax through what you need for the hospitality suite.”

Immediately after hanging up on Stagg I called Jimbo. “Dude!” I shouted into the receiver, “Stagg Meander’s coming to Comdex!”

“Shit! With that swine in town we’ll be fucked for sure!” Jimbo had had a very bad experience with Stagg in 1988 in a topless bar in Atlanta, and never really forgave the man for it. “Hey, isn’t Interpol still looking for that bastard for shipping those Swiss pocket modems to the KGB? I don’t need that kind of shit right now. Remember, I’ve got a real job now, and my credit is just about back to normal . . .”

“Quit whining,” I demanded, “He beat that rap a long time ago. Besides, nobody can prove it was him, and it was only the KGB Resident in San Francisco. There’s no law against shipping shit to San Francisco. Not yet. Hey, look, are you still connected? Stagg seems to feel this Comdex might get ugly.”

“Yeah, I can handle it,” he muttered, “Just shove the shopping list into the fax. Anything I can’t get here we can pick up in Vegas. There’s a place off Spring Valley Road which rents out machine guns for Christ’s sake, so there’s no problem with that. But you’re responsible for transportation. I’m not riding with that maniac. I’m flying to Vegas.”

“Fine,” I said, “No worries.”

The mujaheddin were quiet that week, and Frankfurt’s gnarled air-traffic control mess was no worse than usual, so Stagg arrived at LAX without serious incident Thursday night. Friday noon found us loitering around my office apartment south of Los Angeles, waiting for the Post Office to deliver Express Mail a case of Moët champagne, and we couldn’t begin to make our move until almost three o’clock in the afternoon.

After loading, there was just enough room in the car to accommodate Stagg and me in the front seats. The rear tires very nearly touched the fender, and trying to slow the damned car down once it got going was an adventure. There was very little traction in the front (drive) wheels, so handling was comparable to that of a 1963 Volkswagen Micro Bus with the tires inflated to 250 psi pulling a house trailer. I mused uneasily about our chances of making it over Cajon Pass.

By this time the temperature had climbed to 87ºF, very unusual for November, and it would be worse out upon the sands. I knew it would be irrational to pit our frail selves against the desert in these conditions. Nonetheless, we couldn’t wait any longer, we simply had to get out of the basin and on our way to Vegas whatever the consequences. Keep moving. All this lingering around over a case of champagne was making us both nervous. Finally Stagg, taking charge of the situation, said, “To hell with it. Do we have all the rest of the liquor?” I nodded solemnly. “Then let’s get out of here. If we need anything else we’ll call and have it Fed-Exed out.”

“Maybe we should wait until the traffic clears up,” I suggested, “It’s going to be unattenuated chaos getting out to Riverside right now.”

Stagg considered this for a moment. “You mean go to the Goat Hill Tavern and drink until about nine o’clock, then drive at top speed all the way up through Cajon Pass?” he mused, “It has possibilities. But I think the most important thing right now is to get this vehicle onto the freeway absolutely as soon as possible, then move among the commuters, for camouflage. There’s simply too much at risk, Comdex starts in only three days.”

His arguments were, of course, irrefutable. Las Vegas was over 200 miles away across the most forbidding desert in the Western Hemisphere, a harsh, unforgiving land where the weak or careless were easy prey for rednecked sheriff’s deputies and carnivorous lizards alike. No place for two sun-crazed computer hacks in a Honda Civic Hatchback without air conditioning. Electronic fuel injection and four-wheel independent suspension would be of little use under these ominous circumstances; our only hope was to join the nightly stream from LA to Vegas, racing the confused, middle class runaways who inexplicably abandon their families and careers while driving home from work, bypass their off-ramps, then keep on going, clear out past Barstow to Death Valley, never to be heard from again. Match speed with these hopeless bastards, then veer straight down I-15 as they turn off at Baker, the worst safely behind us.

“And if we really can’t handle the situation,” I said, producing a triple-A freeway map with every freewayside McDonald’s location between Irvine and Victorville marked with dark green ink, “We can always pull off for a rest and some Big Macs.”

Though Stagg appreciated my careful research and preparations (the map would come in very handy), he wanted to squelch any defeatist sentiments before they gained a foothold in our already exhausted minds. “In case of emergency only,” he qualified.

But it transpired that the sun was simply not an issue. Leaving at three o’clock that Friday afternoon, it took us two hours to reach the outskirts of Riverside and the interchange with Interstate 15. Fortified by two Big Macs, two large orders of french fries, twenty Chicken McNuggets, and regular withdrawals from the Igloo ice chest full of San Miguel beer between Stagg’s feet, we approached Cajon Pass as the sun set.

I had made this run in overstuffed Japanese cars many times before, so I knew the best way to attempt the Pass: Give yourself a good five to ten miles in fifth gear to generate the necessary speed, say eighty or ninety miles per hour, then maintain that speed as far up the Pass as possible, downshifting as required to hump it over Cajon Summit, finally roaring into Victorville at 7,500 rpms in third gear. Any failure to maintain escape velocity condemned you instantly to a humiliating thirteen-mile-per-hour crawl up the right-hand lane. I attempted this technique at great risk to life and limb, as the other drivers simply were not cooperating. I was forced to weave willy-nilly amongst the commuters, shifting wildly between fourth and fifth gear while we crossed the murderous San Andreas Fault.

Stagg was alert for signs of California Highway Patrol 5.0 liter Mustangs, but it hardly mattered, since no Highway Patrolman in his right mind would dare to pull over a dangerously overloaded Honda Civic at the foot of Cajon Pass. In fact, I was counting on one or two of them to provide blocking protection. I was far more worried about sociopathic deputies from the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department, a creepy hotbed of dangerous atavistic jingoism.

We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold. I remember saying something like “I feel a bit lightheaded; maybe you should drive….” And suddenly there was a terrible roar all around us and the sky was full of what looked like huge bats, all swooping and screeching and diving around the car, which was going about a hundred miles an hour with the top down to Las Vegas. And a voice was screaming: “Holy Jesus! What are those goddamn animals?”

– Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

The Crossing was smooth and uneventful, and three hours out of Victorville we were racing down the mountain into the painful incandescence of the Whiskey Pete’s, Primadonna and Kactus Kate’s casino complexes which marked the Nevada border. An hour later, we were cruising down Flamingo Road, across the Strip to Paradise.

Traffic on the Strip was Las Vegas Ugly, the typical blend of automotive ineptitude and breezy unconsciousness, with most cars moving along at a brisk (by Vegas standards) seven miles per hour. I was severely handicapped by the pathetic handling of my normally spry Honda, and I very nearly splattered several oblivious motorists who neglected to take the Civic’s overcorpulent condition seriously.

As usual, the pedestrians spilled out onto the Strip like confused termites, reeling, apparently, from ruthless hammerings at the craps tables, and Stagg was obliged to lean out of the window and shout them down as we wove awkwardly by. At the intersection with Paradise, while we were waiting for the left turn arrow, Stagg lunged behind my seat, ratting about for something under my forest green Land’s End sweater. My blood ran cold as I realized exactly what he was searching for; the .357 Magnum. “You son of a bitch!” I shouted, “I paid $600 for that thing! You flash it around here, three blocks from the Strip, and they’ll take it away. I’ll never see it again.”

“Are you crazy?” he said, “This is Nevada! They’ll put you away and flush the key just for transporting these weapons into the State.”

“What’s wrong with the .357?”

“It’s not the .357, it’s that assault rifle under the back seat. If the local fascists find your California semi-auto they’ll tear you to shreds. What do you think’s gonna happen when five of those sadistic Clark County Sheriff’s Deputies catch you and your wimpy Ruger with full-auto permanently disabled? They’ll pummel you to death with their MAC-10s!”

He was right. Still, I preferred some armament to none, especially in this town, especially when I considered the fate of the junketing Baton Rouge Montgomery Ward assistant sales manager who, during the 1988 Consumer Electronics Show, was beaten to death with a 99-cent half-pound hot dog outside the Slots-o-Fun casino by an enraged acid-casualty from Mendocino. Surely, even a semi-automatic assault rifle was more than a match for a 99-cent half-pound hot dog, or was it? “Maybe we should have brought the Uzi,” I suggested.

“Who can afford 9mm ammo anymore?” said Stagg, “Anyway, forget about it. We’re almost to the motel.”

The desk at the Best Western Mardi Gras Inn on Paradise, a block away from the Convention Center, was staffed at night by a pretty teen-aged thing, apparently overwhelmed by the mounting Comdex traffic and obviously alarmed by the prospect of two paranoid and dehydrated computer fiends loping into the lobby. Stagg demanded a room with a view, “It is essential that we overlook the Las Vegas Country Club,” he said from behind his Ray-Ban Wayfarers, “We are professionals.”

This impressed the girl, and we were given the key to a room on the third floor. Stagg looked at her again through his Wayfarers and said, “Hey, you’re too pretty for this kind of work.” He flipped a card in front of her “When you want to see the world, fax me.”

“Hey,” she said, frowning at the card, “This is all in Arabic.”

“Hey, turn it over, it’s English on the other side,” said Stagg, and when she did I could see an address in Damascus and the name “Stagg Meander, Love Merchant.”

“Hey,” said the girl again, but I was already moving, and Stagg muttered, “Let’s get out of here before she calls the manager. I’d hate to have to kill him.”

When we got to the room Stagg ran straight into the bathroom and cranked up the shower to full heat, then hung all his shirts on the curtain rod. “Hey, these don’t look so bad,” he said, waving aloft a hopelessly mangled robin’s egg blue banker’s pinpoint, “They’ve been in that suitcase since my trip to Somalia last June.”

While Stagg rummaged through his bags, I hid the weapons, replacing the ammunition in the black PC Magazine kit bag with several Diego Garcia cigars, a six-pack of Miller Genuine Draft and other essentials. I heard Stagg in the bathroom, submerging his face in the basin, then hawking and spitting noisily into the bowl. When he finally came tramping out, I said, “Let’s go play some blackjack.”

We left the shower on and took the bloated Civic down to the Tropicana. The Trop security thugs eyed the PC Magazine kit bag suspiciously as we moved among the tables, looking for a hot one with the third base seat open. Stagg was looking natty in the Ray-Bans, khaki chinos, silk shirt, paratrooper boots and fruity beret; I was wearing a coordinating Land’s End ensemble highlighted by our famous blue “Nobody Escapes” long-sleeve t-shirt.

While we were playing cards, two obvious Comdexers sat down at the table and began splitting tens, Dave Maxwell and Phil Stacks of DigiMag, an exhibiting company in the tape-backup business. Although the other players were muttering and getting up from the table, these two guys were having the time of their lives; it was apparently the first Comdex they had ever attended and, judging by the way they played blackjack, their first time in Las Vegas. Stagg and I decided to befriend these pathetic bastards, forcing cigars onto them and advising them about what to hit and what not to hit. After about twenty hands, the four of us were hooting and shouting, when suddenly Stagg decided we needed to go to the Hilton at once, to see if there was anybody there we knew. We exchanged business cards with Dave and Phil and left the Trop.

The Hilton itself was very busy, and Stagg and I were sodomized brutally, losing hundreds of dollars within minutes. “This place is very heavy,” said Stagg, and since we couldn’t find anyone we knew, we drove a block down Paradise back to the Mardi Gras Inn. We lifted a few Jamaican Red Stripes out of the Honda and sucked on them in our room while watching the last bits of a tit movie on HBO.

The next morning we parked in the Convention Center lot and wandered over to the registration tent with the black PC Magazine kit bag, this time filled with Anchor Steam beers. We needed exhibitor badges so we could roam the halls during setup, networking like iguanas and making valuable pre-show contacts.

The registration tent was almost empty, as it usually is two days before the opening of the show, when we sauntered up to the “D” window at the exhibitor registration desk. We presented the business cards we had picked up the night before and walked back out of the tent with Dave and Phil’s exhibitor badges.

I must admit, I really enjoy all the pre-show Convention Center activity. The hall is always a mess, with machinery and crates and equipment strewn all over the place, exhibitors screaming at carpenters and at each other, forklifts careening around corners at frightening speeds, the smell of sweat and motor exhaust and, yes, fear. That crazy, numbing fear that grips so many exhibitors as they board their planes to Vegas, which never quite lets go until Monday at noon when the show is on and it’s far too late to worry about lost opportunities. Then they binge like drunken Finns, ignoring the whines and complaints from their salesman who arrive Sunday night, well after the crest of the pre-show madness.

Most exhibitors spend the weekend squawking at the Greyhound Exposition decorators or drinking beer in their booths with Giltspur carpenters. Higher-level dudes delegate the booth set-up to their techies and marketing communications girls and schmooze their way around the hall in polo shirts and Rockport Walkers, just as Stagg and I were doing.

Stagg needed to call his girlfriend in Malaysia, so we walked into what was to become one of the two Microsoft booths. Stagg asked a carpenter, “Say, where’s the phone around here?” and he directed us towards an information counter near the center of the booth, beside a workstation with a techie who was working on Microsoft Excel. Stagg waved at the techie, whose badge said Craig Something. “Hi, Craig,” Stagg said as he dialed the city code for Kuala Lumpur. Craig nodded back morosely, mentally pegging us, no doubt, as some marketing snakes from the Languages Group, and clearly uninterested in anything Stagg had to say on the phone.

After Stagg spoke to Slippery Jo in Kuala Lumpur for about ten minutes, we worked our way around the hall, meeting old friends and making new ones, collecting party invites, and trading most of the beer in the PC Magazine kit bag for t-shirts, hand-held modems, and software samples. Finally, Stagg decided that we ought to go back to the Hilton, to try to get some of our own back from the night before and maybe see some of the college games at the sports book, so we worked our way back through the hall.

On the way out Stagg remembered that he wanted to stop by Hewlett-Packard to pick up a DeskJet, so we detoured by the HP booth, where he asked the first HPer we saw, “So who’s got the DeskJets?” We were sent over to a harried young girl presiding over a ragged sheet of paper with a list of names and companies. Stagg smiled toothily through his beard and said, “I’m Stagg Meander, from WordPerfect, here to pick up our DeskJet.”

“We don’t have you on the list,” the girl said, glancing uneasily at the paper in her hand.

“That’s okay,” he soothed, “Audry didn’t know we needed one until last week. Do you have any to spare?”

She regarded a stack of cartons behind her. “We only have one more.”

“One will be fine,” Stagg said as he hefted the remaining DeskJet. “Do you have any RAM or font cartridges? And I’ll need a parallel cable.”

She found a cable, a meg of RAM and a couple of font cartridges, and I put them in my PC Magazine kit bag. Then I offered her the last Anchor Steam. “It’s a little warm, but you look like you could use a break,” I said, smiling, reminding myself how revolting Anchor Steam tastes when it gets the least bit warm.

She grinned lethargically as she accepted the beer and said, “Thanks a lot. Have a good show.”

“You have a good show too,” said Stagg as he walked off carrying the DeskJet.

At the security desk next to the hall entrance I piled the DeskJet, RAM, fonts and cable in front of the nice old lady guard while Stagg meticulously filled out the equipment pass. Then he gave the pass to the lady with Dave Maxwell’s exhibitor badge. As she ran the pass through the imprinter Stagg shook his head wearily, muttering, “Comdex/Fall, shit. Nobody escapes the damnation.”